Film Review: Don’t Wake The Dead (2008)

German horror director and goremeister extraordinaire Andreas Schnaas delivers yet another over the top and at times downright silly movie. Templar zombies, Nazi zombies, human zombies and rock band zombies, oh my!

REVIEW:

Director – Andreas Schnaas
Screenplay – Klaus Dzuck, Ted Geohegan

Our movie starts off with a very cool voiceover as the history of the castle is given. Seems a long time ago some Templar Knights were killed there by an angry mob of villagers and buried in the ground behind the castle. But not before one of them placed a curse, allowing the Templars to awaken every 66 years if someone is foolish enough to spill blood over the soil. That would never happen, right? But alas, seems we humans just love to awaken mad as hell zombies.

Too bad a group of beautiful women are headed to the old castle to help an old friend Lana (played by Sonja Kerskes) renovate it for an upcoming concert. Actually, they would have been fine had it not been for a crazed Carthusian monk named Vincent (played by Ralph Fellows) who wants to bring the Templars back to kill them. Ah, another brilliant idea headed for disaster as you guessed it, things go terribly wrong.

But lucky for us it makes for one hell of an entertaining movie as blood and severed limbs take center stage. The action stays pretty well paced but it is the bad dialogue and bone-headed characters that make this fun.

Vincent by far is the best character. You gotta love a monk decked out in black leather, carrying an arsenal of weapons that would make Rambo jealous. The best is his flying guillotine, a great weapon to have handy in case you’re ever attacked by the undead. But it is his lines of don’t-mess-with-me dialogue that he fires off quicker than his gun that makes him great.

Of the women, Beth is the nuttiest by far. Seems she struggles with a bipolar disorder over whether or not she should be sad over her friends dying or jumping the monk’s bones. Her heavy drinking does not help this condition. But she’s not the only one after Vincent. Seems a leather-clad monk drives the women wild. Who knew monks had groupies? In one of those yeah right scenes, Lana and Vincent decide to get it on while the zombies are attacking from every which way and the group is running about trying to fortify the castle. Survival is cool and all, but first things first I guess.

The kills are fun and varied. You have death by sword, knife, gun, van door, castle door and wine bottle to name a few. That last one definitely gives new meaning to the phrase drinking yourself to death. And be careful because in true zombie fashion, if one of the zombies takes a chunk out of you, then you get turned into a zombie as well. This happens to the rock band on the way to the castle. In a sequence that I’m still shaking my head over, the now gruesome looking zombie band plays at the castle and the extremely brutal Templar and Nazi zombies take a break from their rampaging and killing and get their groove on. In fact, this continues through the last quarter of the movie. In what can be best described as awkward intercuts, half the zombies kill, half of them party. Death metal at its finest, I suppose. Ironically, the band sounds better after they’re dead than they did when they were rehearsing earlier in the film.

I would recommend seeing this once with a group of friends because it is just so crazy and bad that it is good. You got your buckets of blood, gratuitous nudity, bad dialogue and did I mention the half-naked, headless female zombie wielding a knife? One of those movies you just have to see to believe.

Ted, so sorry about that. Don’t know where my typing skills were that day. My real last name is brutal, I can thank my Polish ancestry on that one. Trying to be a screenwriter myself, after years of ideas floating around in the head. trying to get a website up and running as well. we’ll see what hapens.